[Request Feature] Ability to change PWA name on Apps Manager page.

Copper Contributor

At this point we do want to make any website behave like an application. It only has to be added as an application with the possibility of setting a name from the beginning. This is useful when you have more than one profile in the browser. I can install the web X for profile 1 with the name X-1 and the same web X for profile 2 with the name X-2.

 

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But the problem is when I install a PWA whose name is already set. And it is not possible to change it from any page. So when I want to install Outlook for my 3 profiles, I'm left with the same name for all 3 profiles preventing quick identification.

 

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My proposal would be to allow the App Manager to change the name of the PWA and thus better identify it from the start menu and also from the shortcuts that are created.

 

 

 

10 Replies

@cjaviersaldana thank you for the feedback. That is an interesting idea... currently for PWAs, the name comes from the web developer who created the manifest file on the server. We want to honor that name. However, I do see value in this proposal. I'll raise it up at our next standup.

 

-John

@cjaviersaldana Good Suggestion.

Going forward I noticed this is still an issue. I used to have multiple Outlook Apps based on Edge (PWA) Apps for different profiles. but for some reason these PWA Apps are now broken in Edge (after a recent update?). When re-creating the Outlook Apps they are now named 'Outlook (PWA)' but I cannot give them a specific name for each profile.

 

Thankfully the Teams Web-App is still a normal 'site' hence I can still create an App and choose my own name. Being able to update the Name (and logo/image) of an Edge App would really help as well since some site still use default or undesired icons.

I'm having the same issue.

I agree that this is a useful feature. For non-PWA site, I can install and give them any name. In my case, I have Teams for each tenant / account I have.

 

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However, I can't do that with outlook.

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Granted, Outlook is not as major issue as in Teams case as outlook app can be used with multiple tenant (which Teams has issue with guest/family tenant AFAIK, but it's a different story), but since I'm already using Teams this way, I'd like to use Outlook this way as well.

I also have the same issue with GitHub CodeSpaces. If you install the web version of a codespace as a PWA, the app is generically called CodeSpaces.

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Granted, the guys at GH could solve it nicely, but I think it's better to have a fallback solution in Edge in case the developer isn't interested into giving a instance-specific name.

 

@johnhansen, the current way it works makes PWA's less useful and functional than non-PWA sites. The inability to properly name the app renders these fundamentally flawed. There is no good quick, easy way to distinguish them, like with non-PWA sites installed as apps where Edge and Windows let us enter any name we want. As cjaviersaldana and others here have pointed out, this is especially important for Outlook, because it's the only way to cleanly access multiple tenants.
Please Microsoft. It's 2023 already. Please let us change the name to make the feature actually useful.
Desperately need this, especially on Linux where there are no Microsoft apps outside of the browser.
The absence of renaming is a serious flaw. I have 2 apps, both named "github" by force. One goes to public Github, the other to my company's enterprise instance. The same can be said for a number of other PWA apps. I have to take care to place them physically on different monitors to avoid confusion.

Sometimes good things have serious flaws. Folks should fix those things?